School welcomes visiting scholar Piera Morlacchi

The School of Management welcomed Piera Morlacchi as a visiting scholar in the School during March and April 2023.

Piera is an Associate Professor in Entrepreneurship and Organisation Studies at the University of Sussex Business School (USBS). Her current projects consider digital entrepreneurship, social robotics and digital futures with a focus on the role of imagination and temporality in opening new possibilities for social change and creating desirable futures.

While in St Andrews, Piera presented her recent work in a seminar on 'Doing process research on entrepreneurship as organisation creation: thinking and acting processually with pragmatism'. During the visit she collaborated with Anna Brown, from the Knowledge and Practice thematic research group, on a project about developing further process organisation theory through empirical work on craft skills and entrepreneurship in pottery making.

Piera's research revolves around the multiple intersections of entrepreneurship, organisations, work, technology, and public policy and their implications for new ways of working and organising, and social change. She combines pragmatism-inspired theoretical work with ethnography and archival methods to conduct interdisciplinary, longitudinal and processual research. Her work has been published in leading journals including Organization Studies, Research Policy, and Gender Work & Organization.

In addition to her full-time positions at USBS and previously at Politecnico di Milano and the University of Bath, Piera has held fellowships and visiting professorships at institutions in Europe and in the USA, including the University of Trento, University of Southern Denmark, Stanford and Columbia University.